As industry is entering a new era of Internet of Things (IoT), transmission, reception and processing between humans and objects as well as between objects are realized by aid of networking technologies, and a wide variety of controls, detections and recognitions and services are offered. Such an architecture has shaped a large discrete network encompassing limitless possibilities. Billions of apparatuses that are endowed with embedded techniques can be placed under management, achieve seamless interconnections, and interact with one another in a secure way over networks.
A description of Machine to Machine (M2M) communications has been seen in Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), that is to say, a machine can interact and communicate with other machines, objects, environments, infrastructures and the like. This communication results in the formation of a large amount of data, which, after being processed and analyzed, can be leveraged to provide significant real-time decisions for management and control.
Microcontroller is utilized as the core of traditional gateways in small IoT application architectures having low power consumption, and therefore has become a core technology in pushing forward the development of Machine to Machine (M2M) communications. It enables an integration of peripherals such as CPU, program memory, a data storage unit, Timer/Counter and DI/DO/AI/AO, into a microcomputer on one chip. With the features like small size, low power consumption, simple input/output interfaces, fast development and high reliability in the absence of an operating system, microcontrollers have made themselves suitable for use in the development of IoT gateways.
Traditional IoT gateways are developed in such a manner that a single microcontroller is used in conjunction with peripherals. However, the microcontroller is a component designed for applications, so disparate combined components need to be devised in the light of individual applications in order to meet market's demands. Having failed to meet the wide market with a single architecture, manufactures have to provide microcontrollers that have different core quantities, transmission interfaces, I/O pin quantities and functions. When confronted with the problems that one IoT gateway cannot satisfy the demands to lead to an overly slow command cycle of the processor or that there is an insufficient number of hardware peripherals, developers must redesign the software and hardware architectures of microcontrollers as required by applications or replace the processor with a higher order one to cope with various application scenarios.
Thus, how to provide a microcontroller system and an IoT gateway control system that still have outstanding transmission speeds, stability and functionality even in case of a tremendous amount of data transmissions has become a prominent task in this field for which improvements and endeavors need to be made immediately.